Recently I was asked to provide some advice to a fellow interaction designer wanting to develop a WordPress system for a creative arts learning environment. I provided the following document which I hope can be used as a quick reference guide for other interaction designers.  I hope this is useful for others interested in doing the same.

Summary of the challenges I faced.

When I first started the project with my supervisor I found that I was unable to install open source software on the web server that was provided to me. In line with Schöns action research method I had developed a methodology of studio based research which required me to download a number of open source content management systems which may have meant the requirements of the key stake holders. During this experimentation phase I discovered that none of the software I uploaded to the server would install. I would visit each vendor’s website and document the server requirements and make sure that server was compatible with server I was using. It was only after I contacted the faculty’s I.T support team that I identified the technical reasons as to why the server was not suitable for my project. I was advised that they would be prepared to help me have access to one of their servers for my project. The I.T support team informed me that I needed to ask another faculty based key stakeholder to officially negotiate access to the server. I set-up a meeting with the faculty based key stake holder who owned the server. This person was very helpful and supportive and they where impressed with the design of my project and allowed me to access their server as a shared resource. With the help of the I.T support team and the key stake holder my project was given special project status.

The downside to gaining access to this server was that the faculty I.T support team were not prepared to allow me to share the ePortfolio application with people outside the university. In the methodology section of my thesis I document the impacts of this policy implementation in the negative case analysis section of my thesis which highlights how this affected my participants and why they choose to not use the system. The ePortfolio system requirements to include the ability to leave comments, link to other websites, share the ePortfolio with external visitors and include content for Web 2.0 social networking websites such as Flickr.com, Facebook.com and Lastfm.com. While I had achieved the technicality of implementing this I found that the inability to share these functions had significant negative impacts on the up-take of the project. This was because WordPress had disabled the ability of for the embedding of external new media such as Youtube.com videos into WordPress. I over came this problem by modifying the code slightly as documented in the design outcomes section of my thesis.

The methodology I used to solve the problems.

Below I have included the methodology I included for implementing the software system that ran the ePortfolio system. It is relatively straight forward but not prescriptive and can be modified to suit your individual situation.

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